English

The paper is devoted to the reading and critical reflection of the generated electronic literary texts. From the structural point of view all textones of generated texts can be divided into standard schemes or patterns (word combinations or the whole sentences that are switched according to the software algorithms). Authors use these schemes to make generated texts close to the natural human language. If we look closer, for example, at generative elit works, most of their verbal patterns look like meaningful expressions. But what makes them meaningful and what kind of meaning can readers get from these patterns? Is it possible to catch the esthetic idea of the whole generated work analyzing these verbal patterns? One of the strategies to reveal the author’s aesthetic concept of the generated work is to identify the key words grid of the separate textone as well as of the whole work. The key words grid allows to catch the thematic dominant and then move to the interpretive strategies of the whole literary work.

(Source: the work itself)

For individuals who have suffered from abuse, working with hyperlink texts can, but does not necessarily, provide an opportunity to unpack trauma and experience catharsis. As a disclaimer, this should only be done with the support of a counselor as this sort of writing can also result in becoming retraumatized. “Thin Spaces” is a hyperlink text that introduces interactors to a narrator reliving her experiences of being in an abusive marriage and her subsequent PTSD. Through presenting this autobiographical IDN, the hope is to shed light on abuse cycles and demonstrate one way that they can be broken. “Thin Spaces” weaves through two timelines: a personal timeline of key moments surrounding the abuse and a genealogical timeline consisting of historical documents and family stories of the narrator’s ancestors. The blending of personal experience and genealogy shows that abuse can span generations. The initial framework of the story forms a cycle that culminates in a therapy session. This lexia’s single hyperlink takes readers back to an earlier lexia in the story. This earlier lexia maintains its initial hyperlinks but introduces a new option to break the cycle using an italicized sentence offset from the rest of the text. The strand of lexia proceeding from this new hyperlink moves interactors through the aftermath of the narrator’s divorce, culminating in the hope that survival is possible. Like PTSD, some options in the new lexia–with inverse colors from the initial cycle–cause the reader to re-experience the traumatic episodes of the piece and require them to make the conscious decision to either hit the previous screen arrow within Twine to exit that phase quickly or work through the abusive sections again to find their way back out of the abuse. Being given this choice ties to the aftermath of trauma in which some PTSD episodes can be resolved quickly through deep breathing, self-talk, or somatic strategies while other episodes resist these tactics and take longer to escape. The interactor must be cognizant of the strategy of clicking the previous screen arrow in order to avoid lapsing back into a more lengthy process of sifting through abusive flashbacks, which parallels abuse survivors needing to have the wherewithal to employ the strategies they learn in order to avoid more serious flashbacks or PTSD episodes. At its conclusion, “Thin Spaces” shifts to the narrator being in a healthier place, though still using coping mechanisms to deal with the effects of the trauma. The piece allows readers the choice to exit with the call of the common loon, a calming sound to soothe the interactor after this experience. With this presentation, the audience will have access to “Thin Spaces” and see how the author’s writing process during the Pandemic unfolded, including choices in structure and color as well as the personal experience of writing autobiographically about trauma while quarantining.

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has had a considerable impact on the way cultural heritage organisations engage with their audiences. At a time when public exhibitions and events have to be postponed indefinitely or cancelled, many GLAM institutions have chosen to increase their online presence instead, looking at virtual platforms as a means to deliver content, showcase their collections and drive engagement. The British Library Simulator (https://giuliac.itch.io/the-british-library-simulator) is a brief video game created and released in June 2020, as a way to engage with our audience while the physical library buildings were closed. The game, created using the free online game engine Bitsy, allows players to explore a pixelated rendition of some popular areas of the British Library; by moving their avatar and interacting with other characters in the game, players can learn facts about the history of the building and discover some of the projects the library staff have been working on during the pandemic. One of the main projects we wanted to raise awareness about is the Emerging Formats project: the British Library, with the other five UK Legal Deposit Libraries, have been researching, collecting, archiving and preserving complex digital publications produced in the UK for the past four years. We curate a growing collection of web-based interactive narratives hosted in the UK Web Archive (https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/1836), which includes a variety of format types and interaction patterns, and have just recently launched a collection of all winning and shortlisted entries for the New Media Writing Prize (https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/2912). While most of the collected entries are only available on Library premises for legal reasons, a few can be accessed remotely, allowing for part of the collection to be accessible even during lockdown. Another aim of the game was to highlight the British Library’s effort to collect and archive around COVID-19: the Library has been collecting radio stations recordings, interviews, websites and testimonies to capture the experience of lockdown and living through the pandemic. These also include examples of e-lit produced in the UK, as well as extensive dedicated collections in the UK Web Archive (https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/2975) and the British Library Sounds (https://sounds.bl.uk/). Both are mentioned in the game, in an effort to direct audiences to our digital resources and bring our steady online services into the spotlight. The British Library Simulator offered us a chance to present libraries not just as keepers of knowledge, but as active and engaging content creators; it allowed us to reach new audiences, outside of the usual academic circle; by being an interactive narrative itself, it helped us stress the importance of collecting and preserving contemporary born-digital publications, as well as provide and example of the electronic literature the Library is interested in collecting; and lastly, it highlighted our ongoing effort to keep offering our services online even while the physical Library remains closed.

What happens at the edges of bordercrossing technologies? Our poster showcases an exploratory, Benjaminian digital experiment that queers the investigation into who and what and how emerging technologies connect with our bodies, lives and desires. This work is part of a larger project investigating tools, platforms and digital strategies that help us to weave together the digital and the analogue, human and machine, and interactivity that moves us beyond linearity to multiplicity, and for ELO we are excited to highlighting our proposed experimental project archive, still in the early stages of development as we are considering multiple platforms and seeking feedback. We’re building a kind of queer digital arcades - both platform and method - weaving together poetry, elit, theory and ephemera to perform an interactive, technoerotic story that troubles the borders between technologies, selves, others and the world. Our goal is to offer de-centred and multiple entry points to explore the increasingly ubiquitous technologies that summon our curiosities, vulnerabilities and penetrability, and implicate our skin, our memories of the basement bar, and our bravery. This multivocal work includes both poetic and analytical texts, electronic literature and theory as we work to visually and associatively map a series of technologies and concepts into constellations and queer formations. We understand and use the term “queer” methodologically – that is, we believe that queerness is a way of doing, whether that doing is in the production, consumption, or circulation of digital forms. The queerness here is in the very structure of the interface, the affordances of the platform, the non-linear, expansive, and associative logics that are revealed through exploration. The result is aspirational as much as, or more than, it is analytic, prompting users to imagine new speculative queer worlds as we all grapple with the ones we currently inhabit. The larger project aims to literalize the circuit formed by the digital and the queer, thus representing an emerging, heterogenous interactivity that produces radical possibilities, possibilities that we call edge effects. Our Benjaminian digital arcade aims both to capture and perform some of these edge effects and will include new electronic writing alongside experiments in spatial theorymaking. We are considering a variety of platforms at this time, including: 1) VR Chat; 2) an emerging beta platform for webvr and 3) Unity. We anticipate having screen captures of prototypes across multiple platforms and perhaps active links to beta worlds to share at the time of the conference.

In 1956, the Brazilian avant-garde poet Wlademir Dias-Pino published one of his most famous books: A Ave. All copies of this conceptual work were produced in a craft press, and the content and form of the text (a process poem, as Dias-Pino called it) are inextricable from the materiality of the book, composed of superimposed perforated pages of different colors and transparency levels, with printed letters and polygonal lines. Scholars have considered A Ave an analog predecessor of new media poetry, reflecting on the affordances of paper, ink, punch hole, and bookbinding, and their creative use in a book of visual poetry centered on the imagery of birds in flight. Wlademir Dias-Pino also wrote theoretical texts and a manifest that point to the permutational and the procedural nature of poetic language as code. His contributions as an antecedent to Latin-American digital literature still require further investigation, especially because scholars interested in the history of new media poetry in the continent often pay more attention to the Brazilian concrete poets from São Paulo, such as Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari. Nonetheless, an important gesture of acknowledging Dias-Pino’s contribution to the field was made by the Uruguayan poet Clemente Padín, who created in 2003 the Flash piece Homenaje a Wlademir Dias-Pino. In this animation, a bird graphically constructed as a calligram is seen in flight, and the animal’s body and wings are made of a combination of words that allude to the metadata of A Ave among apparently random ASCII symbols. Padín’s work is included in the Litelat Anthology, but it can no longer be accessed in its “original” format due to the obsolescence of Flash. Although this might initially seem just a setback, the limited temporality of Flash has more to say: as a technological platform with its own lifecycle, it highlights the historicity of Homenaje a Wlademir Dias-Pino as a piece of electronic literature produced for specific software from a specific age. A Ave, on the other hand, is a piece of analog procedural literature meant to be read without any extraneous device, but also susceptible to the physical deterioration that all material culture is liable to. This poster presents some reflections on convergences and dissonances between Wlademir Dias-Pino’s A Ave and Clemente Padín’s Homenaje a Wlademir Dias-Pino, considering both artists’ aesthetic projects, the poetic codes they used, and the affordances of the materialities in which they inscribed their images of birds in flight. We intend to point out how the work by a prominent predecessor of electronic literature is revisited by an established digital artist of our times in a dialogue that is of much interest to the community of Latin American e-lit and to that of electronic literature as a whole.

The Algorithm of Donated Dreams is a sociotechnical artifact and a piece of computational poetry. It is the product of a speculative design experience for the blockchain community DAOstack and the Reshaping Work Barcelona conference in 2019. It is also published in Taper 04 and is live here: https://taper.badquar.to/4/ Guests who participated in its making went through a game of futures to speculate "What if we lived in a society where we donated dreams like we donate blood? And what if those dreams were inserted in an algorithm that made us see we can build that society?". Through our game, guests found challenges in that future society and prototyped solutions first with objects around them and then with language. There were two experiences to arrive to the algorithm: IRL: https://thetimetravel.agency/The-Laboratory-of-Donated-Dreams Online: https://thetimetravel.agency/The-Algorithm-of-Donated-Dreams The code for the algorithm was taken from a tiny computational poem at Taper. Direct link to the algorithm: https://taper.badquar.to/4/algorithm_of_donated_dreams.html

The forced confinement due to the Covid-19 pandemic has been framed as a condition from which to reassess modern life's habits and values, and build upon such reassessment in order to reimagine a more sustainable and equitable future. A ubiquitous feature of such confinement has been the transition from physical/presential modes of expression and interaction to virtual ones, typically supported through electronic platforms. In the current conditions of physical distancing and confinement, electronic-platform culture presents a tension between two opposite but coexisting aspects – isolation and connectedness – both of which it seems to amplify: the former through its implication of physical distance, the latter through its global reach. My poster will offer a reflection on today's recourse to electronic platforms under conditions of physical confinement in light of physiological evidence and philosophical ideas, in particular the work of ancient Chinese thinker Zhuang Zhou's (369-286 BC) emphasis on contemplation as vehicle for the achievement of virtue and wisdom.